Satya Robyn leads a guided Pure Land visualization meditation with group chanting and vows. The session includes the story of Queen Vaidehi, Amitābha chanting, and a merit transfer, with community announcements about upcoming events.
Chapters
Morning everybody, welcome to Ian and Claire joining on soon. We're not going to begin with a glimpse this morning, instead I want to guide you through a visualization practice that the Buddha gave to Ananda hundreds of years ago, 2,500 years ago supposedly. It may have been, it may not have been the Buddha that wrote this originally, but that's a tradition. So one of the Buddha's lay disciples, Kūṇḍhavadeyya, he had a spontaneous vision of the Pure Land may be based on things that she'd heard about it, but it came to her spontaneously and vividly, an experience of being in the Pure Land and seeing the Pure Land. Anānanda said to the Buddha, "Oh, can I have one of those, please?" And so the Buddha gave these meditation instructions, a kind of step-by-step guide So this is very mythological imagery. Um, I invite you to see things, but if you can't, like when we're doing a visualization, not everybody can picture things, but it, it's about having the sense of these things around us. So just go with it. And, and then, uh, later on I'll give some more of the context to where this came from, but I wanted to give you the experience. First. And we may not, um, we may not do the whole thing. So take a moment just to settle into the space, allowing your thoughts to settle. Begin by imagining, imagining the setting sun like a red drum, the Buddha said, suspended above the horizon. Having a sense of where that is, how it appears. And underneath the setting sun is water, the whole Space is full of water like a vast sea. And imagine the water freezing and becoming ice. So the sun is setting over a plane of ice. And the ice becomes lapis lazuli, a precious jewel. Underneath this ice, holding it in place, hundreds of golden pillars covered in jewels. And we can't see them because they're under the ice, but they create this effect of sparkling and glowing, almost like looking through a kaleidoscope. On top of the ice, there are paths made of gold that crisscross and intertwine like a net of cords. With colored jewels and gemstones along the edges of the golden paths, emitting rays of light in the shapes of flowers and suns and moons. These rays of light meeting in the center and creating a pillar of light which is in the shape of temples and pavilions, like a hologram of light and color. This tower covered in musical instruments which play as the wind lightly brushes past them, brushing the strings and And the golden pathways are lined with trees, enormous trees The trees are made from jewels, and the blossoms are jewels, and the flowers are jewels, each jewel emitting a different colored light. The Buddha said the intermingling of light from these colors produces a color unexcelled among all colors.
There are 8.
Lakes in this land, the water from each lake flowing into streams. The banks of each stream are golden, the beds of the stream are strewn with diamonds. There are 600 million seven treasured lotus flowers floating on each lake. In every region of that land of myriad treasures, there are 5 billion treasure palaces adorned with jewels, and in those palaces there are countless heavenly beings playing heavenly music. Like heavenly jeweled banners, musical instruments are suspended in the sky, producing myriad sounds that proclaim the mindfulness of the Buddha, mindfulness of the Dharma, and mindfulness of the sangha. And in the sky, Amitābha Buddha appears. An enormous Buddha of red gold, and to one side Kuan Yin and to the other side Tai Chi Chi, emitting such a light that it is impossible to see them in detail. We'll just spend a few moments allowing that light to reach us and sink into us. Keeping the Buddha in mind and keeping that sense of the light reaching out and touching us as we chant the Buddha's name.
Amitābha. Amitabh. Amitabh. Amitabh. Amitabh. Amitabh. Amitabh. Amitabh. Amitabh. Amee. Amitabh. Amitabh. Amitabh. Amitabh. Mami. Me.
For refuge I go to the Buddha, the one who is awake and full of love. Namo Buddha. For refuge I go to the Dharma, all that guides us to wisdom and compassion.
All that guides us to wisdom and compassion.
Namo Dharmaya. For refuge I go to the Sangha. Those who live in the Buddha's light. Namo Sanghaya. With faith in the Three Jewels, and in light of my human tendencies, and my human tendencies— I pray that I may become aware of when I take life. Of when I take life. —I pray that I may become aware of when I take what is not freely given. When I take which is not really good— I pray that I may become aware— I prayed to me because we're there of when I fall into sexual misconduct— of my fault into sexual misconduct— I pray that I may become aware— —of when I fall into wrong speech— of what? Wrong speech! I pray this—I may become aware— afraid so—when they come away from me, or when I've been intoxicated to perform like becoming toxicated No blame. No blame. Be kind. Be kind. Love everything.
Love everything. Innumerable are sentient beings.
We vow to save them all. Inexhaustible are deluded passions. We vow to transform them all. Immeasurable are the Dharma teachings. We vow to master them all.
Infinite is the Buddha's way.
We vow to follow it completely. Namo Amida Butsu. The word Nembutsu means mindfulness of the Buddha, which, you know, Shinran interpreted. In English, we could say to have faith. In the Buddha, just generally have faith in the Buddha. Honen took it to mean recitation of the Buddha's name. But before Shinran and Honen, and particularly in China before Pure Land Buddhism came to Japan, nenbutsu meant visualizing the Buddha. And this is one of the sets of instructions that would have been used for that practice. And it's, um, it has a number of purposes. Like, actually, the instructions are more complicated than I read out, and there's 7 of these and 6 of those and 4 of these. And those 7s and 6s and 4s are designed to be little mnemonics. Oh yes, so it's the 7 factors of enlightenment and the red lotus represents this and that, okay, and that's those 7. It's the Four Noble Truths and the Three Refuges, which I did read out. So you can sort of hang the whole of the Buddhist teachings off this visualization a little bit. Anji, how you are creating pictographs for Shinran's life story and the Buddha's life story, it's a mnemonic device. But it's not only that. It also serves to get to— it attempts to transmit some of the qualities of a spiritual experience across. This particular sutra, as I said, comes out of that encounter between Queen Vaidehi and Ananda and the Buddha. And Queen Vaidehi was going through a really tough time, she was— she'd been locked away, imprisoned by her son, who was in the process of taking the throne from his father, allegedly inspired by whisperings from Devadatta, the Buddha's cousin, who knew that the Buddha was friends with King Ajāsattu, and, and partly just wanted to cause harm to the Buddha by by having his friend suffer. So there's this whole drama around all of this, and Queen Vaidehi ends up in prison, and her husband is in prison and not being fed, and her son is, you know, acting out in this really terrible way. At one point she says to the Buddha, 'What karma must we have inherited to have been born in this lifetime with relatives such as these?' because Devadatta, who's the one who set all this in motion, is the Buddha's cousin. So there's this whole family drama going on, this kind of Hollyoaks, EastEnders thing. But it's— she's really suffering. And in the midst of this suffering, the Buddha comes to see her, and something in that encounter creates an opening in her, and she has this very vivid, genuine spiritual experience of the Pure Land appearing, or of suddenly feeling like she's in the Pure Land herself. And I guess she comes out of that change, she comes out of it glowing, she comes out to having faith in the Buddha. In fact, she has an experience of seeing lots of different Pure Lands. And she chooses to focus on Amida because there's no hell realms there. It's a place where there's no suffering. It's a place of complete acceptance. A very powerful spiritual experience. It reminds me a bit of the spiritual experience of that, um, priest that we didn't watch the documentary about that was featured on This American Life who had the, uh, It's an evangelical priest in the States who ran a super church and he had— yeah, Carson Pearson. He had like Christian— yeah, he had, um, you know, a whole team of ministers working for him, thousands of people coming to this super church. And one day he was watching the news about, I think it was, um, a famine in Yemen. And so, yeah, somewhere in Africa. Yeah, I think it was might have been in Yemen. And he kind of looked to the skies and said, sure, just because these people— look how much these people are suffering just because they're Christians, surely they're not going to get into heaven. And he had an experience of what he describes as the Holy Spirit appearing and saying, don't be silly, of course they're going to get into heaven.
You said that the wrong way around. Just because they're not Christians doesn't mean they're not going to get into heaven.
Yeah, what did I say? What did I say? Christians. Oh yeah, so they're not Christians. And, and in the teaching of his church, like, if you're not Christian, you're not going to heaven. And these people were really suffering, and he was like, how can you exclude these people? Look how they're suffering in this lifetime. And the Holy Spirit was like, of course they're coming in. Every— and then everybody's coming in. Um, and, and he went on to teach and practice from this place and sort of lost most of his congregation and lost his job at a theological college because it was such a radical theology of complete acceptance. And Queen Vaidehi experienced something of the same kind of experience that came with this visual quality, this kind of shamanic journey quality. And Ananda says, 'I'd like some of that, please.' So the Buddha said, okay, I can tell you how to get a taste of that. And actually in the instructions, it's much slower. You visualize the setting sun, and the Buddha says, don't move on to the next stage until you can see the setting sun with your eyes closed, with your eyes open, like without even trying, trying, you're just always dwelling in the presence of the setting sun. And then the water in the same way. And so you very slowly build up this very deep immersion in the visualization, which is designed to give some flavor, some kind of mythic poetic experience of the same kind of quality that, that these two other people I mentioned received. And for that reason, because Ananda asked for and received this visualization, he's often described as the first Pure Land Buddhist. The first patriarch of Pure Land Buddhism. And then, as I say, it changed a little bit as it moved through time and through geography to become the practice that we do today. But I think, I think there's something of value of knowing the history and of having like the the practice that we do, even if it is just the very simple practice that Shinran had of entrusting himself to the Buddha, it is grounded in these very real, deep spiritual experiences of people encountering the Buddha and the Pure Land. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.
Namaste. Namaste. Namaste.
In gratitude, we offer this incense to all Buddhas and Bodhisattvas throughout space May it be fragrant as the Earth herself, reflecting our careful efforts, our wholehearted awareness, and the fruits of understanding slowly ripening. May we and all beings be companions of Buddha and the disciples.
May we awaken from forgetfulness and realize So we'll transfer merit to Alex, a friend of Kusuma's daughter, Grace, for 14-year-old boy who died of sepsis this week, and to his family and to Grace. Now, you know, in lots of Buddhist schools, when they transfer merit, really what they're doing is sending their own spiritual energy to that person to sort of hold them and support them through the bardo into a better rebirth. And we can also do that, but as pure land Buddhists, we also know that that our merit really is by the grace of the Buddha, which is a much bigger merit than ours. So we're both reminding ourselves and really transmitting that reminder that there is this great ocean of merit that all of these people are held in, that is much faster than anything we can summon ourselves. So a couple of announcements. At— in half an hour, Satya Robyn will be going into the garden to do some work for now, which you're invited to join us for. All hands gratefully received. And tomorrow evening at 7:30 is the kirtan, which is going to be very lovely. Do come along to that. If you're available.
And just to remind you, I'm still doing— I'll be doing my Zooms at 8 AM every day till next— for 11 more months. So do feel free to join me anytime or come to town and sit with me.
Namaste. Blessed by our Mother's Father's light, may we care for all living things.
